Cooper Paves Space Trail for Gemini, Apollo  |  This Week In Space History

by michael shinabery

Editor’s note: This is part two of a two-part story. Read part one here.

Gordon Cooper’s record-length mission took him one place no astronaut had yet traveled. That was “over Communist Chinese territory – the first U.S. spaceman to cross any Red country – on his 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and final orbits,” the United Press International news service reported. The Amarillo Daily News published the story on May 16, 1963.

Not long after achieving Earth orbit the day before, Cooper began initiating experiments aboard his capsule, Faith 7. Walter Williams, NASA’s Mercury Flight Program operations chief, told the press that “after the third round trip that Cooper was performing all of his space experiments – designed to aid the longer Gemini and Apollo moon flights of the future – on schedule,” UPI said, this in a story in the Tucumcari Daily News.

“Cooper’s primary job was to manage his ‘consumable’ supplies – oxygen, water and electricity – and to report on his physical condition,” Michael Cassutt wrote in “Who’s Who in Space: The First 25 Years” (G.K. Hall & Co./1987). In addition, according to UPI, he “was to test further the effects of weightlessness on human beings.”

One experiment did not work as expected. In the third orbit, Cooper “released a 10-pound sphere, about the size of a duckpin bowling ball, carrying two flashing lights,” UPI said. “The idea was to see whether astronauts could easily spot beacons in the sky. Such beacons might be used to guide astronauts of the Gemini and Apollo programs to other spacecraft in orbit.” According to the story, Cooper “reported he was not immediately able to see the lights from the little ball traveling near him in space. In an effort to get a glimpse of them, he took over personal control of his Faith 7 cabin, swinging the craft around in space.”

Cooper carried “a 10-pound television camera,” UPI said, with which he “transmitted pictures of himself and the interior of his cabin.” The images were sent to the Grand Canary Island and then on to Cape Canaveral, and described “as fuzzy on home television.” However, later that evening, NASA expected AT&T’s Telstar 2 to be in position to transmit more “satisfactory” images. He was later scheduled to take pictures of the Pacific sunset, and “infrared weather photographs,” The Associated Press reported in the Amarillo Daily News. He was in his ninth orbit when NASA praised the flight as “almost textbook perfection,” and he readied himself for a night’s sleep, UPI said. By then, Cooper “had been awake for more than 18 hours except for a quick snooze he reported on one pass over California.”

During the 19th orbit, an electrical glitch “falsely indicated” the automatic systems had begun reentry, Cooper’s NASA biography stated. The altitude and navigational instruments failed next. Loss of power to the automatic control followed.

“But to Gordo Cooper, trouble in flight was what they paid him to handle,” Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton wrote in “Moon Shot” (Turner/1994). “ ‘Well,’ he called the

flight controllers in his unmistakable (Oklahoma) twang, ‘it looks like we’ve got a few little washouts here. Looks like we’ll have to fly this thing ourselves.’ … This was the hoped-for payoff in the face of the NASA image makers who didn’t want that redneck tooling about in space.”

NASA recalculated reentry and Cooper fired the retro-rockets. Temperatures of 3,000 degrees during what the biography called a “fiery plunge … ate away his heat shield.”

“Faith Seven came out of space, rolling steadily, the Oklahoma boy flying with a precision that controllers mumbled was tighter than the autopilot had ever delivered,” stated “Moon Shot.” He splashed down only four miles from the recovery carrier, the biography said, proving “astronauts could save spacecraft.”

When Cooper next flew, he commanded Gemini V in August 1965, with Pete Conrad. That mission made Cooper “the first man to make a second orbital flight,” said jsc.nasa.gov, and he achieved another endurance record over the nearly eight days and 120 orbits.

However, Cooper’s two NASA flights weren’t his last. “In April 2007, two years after his death,” according to nndb.com, his “cremated ashes were briefly rocketed into suborbital space, then returned to his family.” A second attempt followed in August 2008, said abcnews.go.com. “When the rocket failed to get to orbit, neither did the cremated remains, or, for that matter, some small satellites sent by NASA and the Department of Defense.”

While the “satellites were lost,” the company that arranges such flights, Celestis, “had a performance guarantee, which means it holds some ashes back just in case something goes horribly, terribly wrong,” the story said. “Hence, a second chance.”

That took place five years later, on May 22, 2012, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket once again carried Cooper ashes alongside more than “306 other people,” abcnews.go.com said. One of his companions was no stranger to space, either: James Doohan, the Star Trek actor who portrayed Chief Engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott.

Michael Shinabery is an education specialist and Humanities Scholar at the New Mexico Museum of Space History.

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